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Who We Are »
Betsy Combier

Help Us to Continue to Help Others »
Email: betsy.combier@gmail.com

 
The E-Accountability Foundation announces the

'A for Accountability' Award

to those who are willing to whistleblow unjust, misleading, or false actions and claims of the politico-educational complex in order to bring about educational reform in favor of children of all races, intellectual ability and economic status. They ask questions that need to be asked, such as "where is the money?" and "Why does it have to be this way?" and they never give up. These people have withstood adversity and have held those who seem not to believe in honesty, integrity and compassion accountable for their actions. The winners of our "A" work to expose wrong-doing not for themselves, but for others - total strangers - for the "Greater Good"of the community and, by their actions, exemplify courage and self-less passion. They are parent advocates. We salute you.

Winners of the "A":

Johnnie Mae Allen
David Possner
Dee Alpert
Aaron Carr
Harris Lirtzman
Hipolito Colon
Larry Fisher
The Giraffe Project and Giraffe Heroes' Program
Jimmy Kilpatrick and George Scott
Zach Kopplin
Matthew LaClair
Wangari Maathai
Erich Martel
Steve Orel, in memoriam, Interversity, and The World of Opportunity
Marla Ruzicka, in Memoriam
Nancy Swan
Bob Witanek
Peyton Wolcott
[ More Details » ]
 
John Tierney on Public v Private School Performance
New York Times Columnist Tierney writes that "Even though the private schools spent less money per pupil than the public schools, the parents were much more satisfied with them. Happier parents, better students, lower costs — those are the clear advantages of private schools and voucher programs."
          
July 18, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Spinning a Bad Report Card
By JOHN TIERNEY, NY TIMES

LINK

Thanks to a new federal report comparing public and private schools, there’s no doubt that public schools have one huge advantage: the leaders of their unions are unrivaled masters of spin.

They didn’t merely celebrate the report’s release on Friday, they complained that the Bush administration tried to bury it by releasing it for the weekend. They spun so well that the report was treated as a public-school triumph that “casts doubt on the value of voucher programs,” as The Wall Street Journal described it.

But if anything, the report from the Education Department did just the opposite. It concluded, after compensating for socioeconomic differences and other factors, that public-school students score slightly better on tests in fourth grade, while private-school students score slightly better in eighth grade. Given a choice, would you rather be ahead in the fourth inning or later in the game?

But even if you ignore that trend, even if you focus on the overall similarity of the scores in both types of school, that’s still bad news for public schools. Their students ought to be scoring higher if you believe in the unions’ favorite prescription for improving education: more money.

Most private schools are not places like Exeter or Dalton. They’re Catholic parochial schools and others on lean budgets. According to federal surveys, the typical private school’s tuition is only about half what a public school spends per pupil.

The public schools are spending more even if you exclude their expenses for special education, buses, lunch programs and central administration, as William Howell and Paul Peterson found in a study of New York elementary schools. The political scientists calculated that the public schools were still spending twice as much per pupil as were the Catholic schools in New York.

General Motors would not celebrate the news that its $40,000 Cadillac performed almost as well as a $20,000 Honda. It would not have its dealers put up signs reading: “Why Pay Less? Our Cars Are Nearly As Good.” But that’s the logic of the teachers’ union leaders who want to prevent students from getting vouchers and taxpayers from saving money.

For fans of public schools, about the only bright spot in this new study is that it’s not as damning as previous comparisons, but that’s because it’s a much less rigorous study. Its authors caution that it’s of “modest utility,” and other scholars think that’s too kind. Some critics fault its methodology and say it understates the advantages of private schools, and some don’t think this kind of comparison can prove anything.

The best way to compare schools is not to simply look at test scores one year, because it’s impossible to account for the students’ intrinsic advantages and disadvantages, and their varying motivations for choosing one type of school over another. Researchers can try to control for factors like family income and ethnicity or race, but these are crude measures.

Why, for instance, do some poor parents switch to a private school while their equally poor next-door neighbors are content with public school? Are the private-school parents more motivated because they put more value on education? Or are they just more desperate for a change because their children were doing much worse in public school than the children next door?

The most scientific way to compare schools is with the kind of randomized experiment that has been conducted in New York, Dayton and Washington. In these cities, students from low-income families were given a chance to apply for school vouchers. After the vouchers were awarded by lottery, researchers tracked the voucher students in private schools and compared them with a control group: the losers of the lottery who remained in public school.

After three years, the white and Hispanic voucher students were doing as well as their counterparts in public school, and the African-American voucher students were testing a full grade level higher than the blacks in the control group. The parents of all the voucher students — white, Hispanic and African-American — reported that there was much less fighting, cheating, vandalism and absenteeism in their schools than did the public-school parents.

Even though the private schools spent less money per pupil than the public schools, the parents were much more satisfied with them. Happier parents, better students, lower costs — those are the clear advantages of private schools and voucher programs. No wonder the teachers’ unions are so busy spinning.

A New Look at Public and Private Schools: Student Background and Mathematics Achievement

Public Schools Do Better in Math

US: Education Department Favoring Privatization
by Michael Dobbs, San Francisco Chronicle
January 3rd, 2004

LINK

WASHINGTON -- When Arizona schools superintendent Lisa Graham Keegan and a group of predominantly conservative educators began the Education Leaders Council in 1995, their proclaimed goal was to upset an educational establishment long dominated by the Democrats and left-leaning teachers unions.

Nearly a decade later, Keegan and her allies have become the establishment -- and the left is crying foul.

People for the American Way, a liberal advocacy group, recently released a report depicting Keegan's group as the center of "a network of right-wing foundations" that have received more than $77 million in U.S. Department of Education funds to promote their "school privatization" agenda. The report notes that a co-founder of the council, former Pennsylvania education secretary Eugene W. Hickok, is now the second-ranking official at the federal agency.

While there is a tradition of Republican and Democratic administrations rewarding allies, critics argue that the amount of money steered toward conservative educational groups by the Bush administration far exceeds the practices of the past.

"It's a farce," said Kathleen Lyons, spokeswoman for the National Education Association, the largest teachers union in the country. "On the one hand, we have the Bush administration claiming that its education reforms are all scientifically based, and on the other hand we see the administration providing a grab bag of Santa gifts to conservative groups."

The People for the American Way report "exposes a stealth campaign by the administration to reward groups that support its private-school voucher agenda at the expense of strengthening public schools," said Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Senate education committee.

"Balderdash," said Education Undersecretary Hickok. If there were any favoritism, he said, it was "favoritism in the sense that we support those organizations that support No Child Left Behind," a law President Bush signed in January 2002 that intends to raise educational standards through high- stakes testing and better-qualified teachers.

"Welcome to the vast right-wing conspiracy," laughed Keegan, chief executive of the Education Leaders Council, who was a candidate for secretary of education after Bush was elected.

Education Department records show that the council received $13.5 million over the last two years for its "Following the Leaders" project, which develops computer programs to monitor implementation of the No Child Left Behind law. A further $45 million in grants has been awarded to groups closely associated with Keegan's organization, such as the National Council on Teacher Quality and the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence.

The bulk of the money the department gave Keegan's network has gone to developing alternative forms of teacher certification. The No Child Left Behind law stipulates that every student has the right to a "fully qualified" teacher, a requirement that has strained traditional teacher training colleges.

Keegan said it was only natural that the Bush administration should want to correct a liberal bias in American education by giving grants to groups that share its philosophy. While she rejects the "right-wing" tag, she says "it is necessary to be ideological in education these days if you want to promote academic standards, school choice and new routes to certifying teachers that work against the grain of current ideas in education."

 
© 2003 The E-Accountability Foundation